The Clockmaker's Shop

Don’t you love old-fashioned shops? Like sweet shops where the sweets are still displayed in rows of tall glass jars, and you can find tastes and scents and colours which take you right back to your childhood. Or hardware stores where everything is crammed in, higgledy-piggledy, but where they stock everything you could ever need to clean or make or mend around the house. Happily, we have good examples of both kinds of shop less than 15 minutes from here.

But my favourite of all the quaint shops locally has to be the clockmaker‘s. Stepping into this tiny shop with its brightly-coloured façade is truly like stepping back in time. The minute room is more like a museum than a shop. The dark, wood-panelled space offers little for sale. Instead, the glass cabinets display mysterious and archaic clock-making instruments.

There’s never anyone in the shop itself. The proprietor is always ensconced in the room behind, presumably making clocks. A proper old shop bell clangs as you close the door behind you, and then you wait..….until the tall gentleman finishes whatever delicate operation he’s engrossed in and comes to greet you. Words like ‘gentleman’ and ‘greet’ are so apt; because that’s exactly how he appears and what he does. And with such courtesy. The whole experience is positively Dickensian.

Rarely do I have occasion to step into this time warp (perhaps I should start collecting broken clocks?); but this week afforded such a chance (see? The Dickensian thing is catching). I entered the lovely old place, the bell jangling behind me, and waited patiently. The courteous man appeared and I told him that my watch needed a new battery. He took the watch from me, pressed his jeweller’s magnifying lens into his eye socket and proceeded to examine the watch closely. Very closely. Then he began to demur and mutter. I was baffled. Usually, a cursory glance tells him that he has the correct battery in stock and off he vanishes into the room behind to fit it. But not this time. Instead, he proceeded to tell me gently that there was nothing wrong with the battery, but that various parts inside the watch itself had clearly given up the ghost. ‘You mean it’s dead?’ I asked bluntly. He lowered his head slightly. ‘I’m afraid it is,’ he said seriously. ‘I’m very sorry’. It was for all the world as if he was offering condolences upon a bereavement.

So then I began to smile a lot and make light of my loss. I didn’t want the poor man to be thrown into such a sombre state on my account. And, truly, I was happy. Sad to say goodbye to a favourite watch to be sure, but so thrilled by the wonderfully anachronistic encounter I’d just had, it was almost worth the loss of my…erm….timepiece.

I shall continue to patronise the clockmaker’s shop whenever the opportunity presents itself because I want such shops to carry on forever and ever. Amen!